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To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

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Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#51

Post by derefr »

shadowgovt wrote: post #14
Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

It's not even so much about protecting the secret sauce as protecting user data. Every tool interfacing to the Google backend is a potential attack vector. When the time comes that nobody's willing to bear the cost to keep it updated as the core infrastructure changes, the product dies. In a world where Google is split up, that'll still be true; it'll look more like "Google CoreCloud has just changed API foo to prote…

> Who pays for search in a world where the government has stepped in and divested ads and search from each other?

Since most of the revenue from Google's ads are from ads on search, presumably the broken-up ads company would be buying the ad space on the broken-up search company's SERPs. All the search company's revenue would still come from the ads company.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#52

Post by [deleted] »

dilippkumar wrote: post #46
Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

> Splitting Google up, forcing this infrastructure to become open, etc would be much healthier than perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce. There are probably many Googlers here who have sacrificed huge portions of their life and time getting the Google infrastructure to work. Forcing engineers to make changes to their creation is insane. Personally, I’d rather not build anything than hav…

[deleted]

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#53

Post by mthoms »

xondono wrote: post #24
shadowgovt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly, it's not. It's evidence that Google knows some words are open to misinterpretation, so engineers are encouraged to use more accurate words and not stray into words with colloquial meanings differing from their legal meanings (because subpoenas lack context). If I say I'm "killing it" this week, I'm not committing homicide.

Well, I’ve never known any colloquial use of “network effects”, it’s quite the technical term with well defined meaning.

Agreed. See also "barriers to entry". But the one that irks me the most is —

> "We’ve got lots of competitors, so don’t assume we control or dominate any market."

So basically... lie?. In search (their bread and butter), they certainly don't have "lots" of competitors and they absolutely do "dominate" the market.

It's one thing to discourage the use of certain phrases. It's quite another to encourage blatant dishonesty.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#54

Post by shadowgovt »

michaelt wrote: post #41
shadowgovt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. The key idea of the training is that rank-and-file SWEs don't realize that words have legal meanings separate from their colloquial meanings, and they can cause undue trouble for the company and for themselves with poor word-choice. It's more about "Don't say the product is 'dominating the market' when you don't have any idea what your product's percent share is in the market or, for that matter, how 'ma…

Did you read the slide that says > "Bad: the defensive rationale for this acquisition is clear: Get ahead of the competition and cut off their access to the target's product" > "Good: The rationale for this acquisition is clear: Integrate the target with Google and improve our products for users" It takes some pretty serious mental gymnastics to believe someone writing a document explaining why Google should perform…

But they do know why they're performing the acquisition: to integrate the target with Google and improve products for users.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#55

Post by im3w1l »

cortesoft wrote: post #34
nxc18 wrote: post #30

I wonder where the line is. Is it ok for a startup like slack to attempt to 'kill email'? Is it ok for a startup like Slack to try to 'destroy' email? What about destroying Outlook specifically? I'm also wondering to what degree this would apply if Google didn't have so many products; would it be ok for Gmail employees to destroy Outlook if Gmail was its own company, separate from all the rest? As a personally compet…

It is ok for a startup to want to 'kill' competitors. Regulators don't care if companies WANT to establish a monopoly. They only care if they succeed.

What if years later you do succeed?

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#56

Post by nojito »

Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

Google will likely go under if they are broken up.

The prevailing theory is that their ad success is solely due to data sharing throughout their service offerings.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#57

Post by compiler-guy »

If you think this rule is silly because the lawyers ought to know that when an engineer says something that uses a term used colloquially that the lawyers will interpret legally, you aren't allowed to be pedantic when a non-programmer uses a programming term incorrectly either.

Like, you can't complain when someone says "growing exponentially" when they mean "growing really fast."

It's the same sort of problem, and it is unfortunate that the lawyers can do it. But It happens in every field, really.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#58

Post by crdrost »

flak48 wrote: post #32

I don't work at Google but I had to take similar training too, where using words/phrases like 'dominant', 'market share', 'leading in a market' etc were discouraged. Specifically because the 'market' can be interpreted in a zillion different ways, especially for tech companies. Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking. Peter Thiel in Zero to One also gives examples of how a company can be considered a…

Right, and it’s also a culture thing.

If you are operating in the Valley then you get startupy folks who really think in terms of “that’ll crush our competition”... Maybe that is an intrinsic sort of motivation, talking to yourself like that? But it’s not a great culture for the company as a whole because it creates an implicit assumption of a zero-sum game. Like strategically you want to instead be saying something like “they can have that space and we are going to differentiate ourselves by leading in this other space” then you foster a culture of creativity rather than competition. And that then infects the rest, like whether your employees are trying to squeak by on 4 hours of sleep—one culture says “fuck yes we gotta keep crushing it” and the other says “I need you to take a day off because I need you at your best and this is you running at 20%.”

Google is weird because the company internals seem to be structured for maximum recruitment; it is meant to be a developer’s paradise. Conventional companies are structured around their executives, it is a paradise for the leadership. Google culture is very focused on creating a paradise for the coders.

Not saying that it doesn't also limit Google’s liability, of course it does, so Legal probably also wants to limit discussion about beating the crap out of any other company in the market. But if you really think your employees are all artists, it is weird to hear artists get super-competitive.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#59

Post by jacquesm »

shadowgovt wrote: post #14
Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

It's not even so much about protecting the secret sauce as protecting user data. Every tool interfacing to the Google backend is a potential attack vector. When the time comes that nobody's willing to bear the cost to keep it updated as the core infrastructure changes, the product dies. In a world where Google is split up, that'll still be true; it'll look more like "Google CoreCloud has just changed API foo to prote…

That's why we originally had an IETF and RFC's were publicly commented on and why standards are supposed to be company agnostic.

The whole proprietary-APIs-over-HTTP was a giant step back. Before we did that interop between internet based applications was far more common and supported. Now every company treats 'their users' as their own private little walled garden when before 'your users' were not so much cows to milk as they were users you exposed services to at the protocol level.

We have been able to move very fast and very far because of this shortcut but the price is a very high one and I'm not so sure if in the longer term we will end up with an advantage.

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